Career

Worked as assistant to photographer, mid-1966; factory worker at Opel
automobile factory, 1971; taxi driver in Frankfurt, Germany, l976-81;
member of Revolutionary Combat; joined German Green Party, c. 1977;
bookstore clerk at the Karl-Marx bookstore, Frankfurt, early 1980s;
elected to the Bundestag, 1983; Green Party minister for the environment,
state of Hesse, Germany, 1985-87, and 1991-94; Green Party co-chair in the
Bundestag, mid-1990s; vice chancellor and foreign minister in the
government of Gerhard Schroeder, 1998—.

Sidelights

In a country not especially known for the colorful personalities of its
politicians in the modern era, Germans give their enigmatic and outspoken
foreign minister Joschka Fischer high marks. Fischer has served in two
consecutive coalition governments headed by Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder,
and proved an adept diplomat on the international

Joschka Fischer

stage. But his early years as a radical agitator, and evidence thereof,
would return later to nearly derail his political career.

The son of a butcher, Joseph Martin Fischer was born in 1948 in Gerabronn,
a small town in the Baden-Württemberg state, of which Stuttgart
serves as the capital. Fischer grew up in a generation born just after the
end of World War II that viewed their parents' era with some
suspicion. While many ordinary Germans were innocent of blame for the Nazi
period and the crimes of World War II, the pall of shame left over the
country was felt sharply by its youth.

Fischer left school at age 15, and settled in Frankfurt as a young man.
For a number of years, he held a series of odd jobs, including driving a
taxi and working in a Marxist bookstore. His real career, however, was
politics, and he was an active participant in one of the extreme-left
groups to which many in his generation of West Germans had seemed to
gravitate, called Revolutionary Combat. They were known for staging
pitched street demonstrations, and Fischer even lived in an illegal
"squat," an empty building taken over for living quarters,
with members of the group.

Fischer's transition from anti-capitalist leftie to foreign
minister of one of Europe's largest countries was not an entirely
abrupt one. He was with the Revolutionary Combat group until 1977, when
leftist groups began carrying out more deadly attacks in what became known
as the notorious
Deutscher Herbst,
or "German Autumn." Spurning violent acts as a tool for
change, Fischer joined the emerging Green Party around this time. The
Greens—comprised largely of younger West Germans—had an
anti-war, pro-environment platform that coalesced around a key issue:
opposition to the installation of United States nuclear weapons on West
German soil.

The Greens quickly gained political clout and won seats in West
Germany's Bundestag, or parliament, in 1983. Fischer was elected in
that first wave of new legislators, and proved as skilled at mainstream
politics as he had in radical circles. In 1985 he was made the environment
minister for the state of Hesse in the first state-level political
coalition between the Greens and the Social-Democrat Party (SPD),
Germany's leading liberal party. He served in the post for two
years, and held the role again in the early 1990s. In the interim, what
had been East Germany reunited with West Germany when Eastern bloc
communist states fell one by one. It was a long hoped-for reunification,
but stirred up other issues, primarily social and economic.

Some of the troubles were blamed on the long-ruling Christian Democrat
Party, and German voters ousted it in 1998 in favor of the Social
Democrats. SPD leader Gerhard Schroeder became chancellor of Germany, but
had to build a coalition with the Green Party in order to secure the post
and form a government. He handed out several cabinet positions to Green
Party members, and made Fischer his foreign minister. One of
Fischer's first controversial moves was to support the sending of
5,000 German troops to Kosovo as part of a North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO) mission. Some pacifist Green politicians were so
incensed by the decision—it marked the first time since World War
II that German soldiers fought on foreign soil—that they resigned
from the party.

At times, Fischer's enemies seem to come from all sides. In 2001,
the daughter of a famous West German radical who had died in prison
claimed that the foreign minister had lived in a house with other members
of the Rote Armee Fraktion ("Red Army Faction"), the most
notorious of all West German leftist groups in the 1970s, which almost put
him in trial for perjury after testifying in a court case against one of
them. Around this same time, the
Stern
("Star"), a popular German weekly tabloid newspaper,
published a 1973 photograph of Fischer in a squatters' battle with
the police in which he was clearly enjoying the upper hand. Some Germans
called for his resignation, but Schroeder voiced his support for Fischer,
who apologized to the police officers' union and to the officer as
well, Rainer Marx.

Fischer remained in office, and the SPD won reelection in 2002, but just
barely. He was campaigned alongside Schroeder, an unusual move for a
minister, but Fischer enjoys high approval ratings among
Germans—better even than his boss. As foreign minister, he was a
stalwart opponent of the United States plan to invade Iraq in 2003. A
month before the war, he spoke at conference in Munich at which U.S.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had been trying to recruit European
support for the American cause. Rumsfeld presented the White
House's case, which involved supposed evidence of weapons of mass
destruction, and then Fischer stepped to the podium to speak. Rumsfeld did
not wear his translation headset, and was chatting with a colleague when
Fischer broke from his speech in German to call out to Rumsfeld in
English, "Excuse me, I am not convinced. I am not
convinced!" according to
Nation
writer Paul Hockenos. He then returned to his native German tongue,
saying "We owe our democracy to the United States, but we must be
convinced."

Some political pundits see Fischer as a leading candidate for the newly
created post of foreign minister for the European Union, which will even
have its own diplomatic corps. He will also campaign alongside Schroeder
in the 2006 general elections. He has been married four times and owns an
Andy Warhol portrait of Willy Brandt, West Germany's Nobel Peace
Prize-winning chancellor in the 1970s and longtime SPD chair. Fittingly,
only Brandt enjoyed similar popularity in a country which seemed to prefer
its politicians bland and decidedly uninspiring for so many years
following the Nazi era. But even the evidence of Fischer's slugging
of a police officer did little to damage his reputation, in a country were
the older generation seems to appreciate the activism of their children.
Even Marx, the retired police officer once assaulted by him, told the
New York Times
's Roger Cohen that "what Fischer did in his youth, many
people did. He demonstrated and then it escalated. He has taken all this
to heart. He is a very good foreign minister, and should remain."